Jack Mason, the Old Sailor | Page 2

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JACK MASON'S VISIT TO THE NORTH SEA.
If you should go a great way north, you would find it very cold. The
further you go north, the colder it is. I went so far that way one time,
that I got almost frozen. The ship I sailed in came close to an iceberg
once, and we all thought for a while that the ship would strike the
iceberg. If it had struck, it would have been broken all in pieces, and we

should have been drowned or frozen, every one of us. God was kind
and good to us, though. The wind was blowing very hard, and right
toward the iceberg. But just as we had got almost up to it, the wind
changed, and blew us away from it.
But I forgot that you do not know what an iceberg is. It is a great hill of
ice. In the North Sea, these ice-hills are often as high as your church,
and sometimes a great deal higher. These hills of ice are floating along
the water there, and when it is foggy or dark, the sailors cannot always
see them. So sometimes the ship strikes them, and is dashed to pieces.
Sometimes it gets between two of these ice-hills, and gets crushed, as if
it was a little boat. Then the men in the ship have to get out, and jump
upon one of the ice-hills. But they are pretty likely to be frozen to death
then.
[Illustration: The Indians.]

THE INDIANS.
In that cold country I saw some Indians. They were dressed in skins. I
never saw such dirty-looking men and women before in all my life, and
I have never seen any such since. They had never seen a ship before, I
should think. I thought they did not know much more than the white
bears. Why, they would sell almost all the clothes they had on, if we
would give them a few pieces of glass, or a nail or two. One of the
women who came to the ship had a little girl about four years old, and
she said she would give us that girl, if we would let her have a tin pan
which she saw.
These Indians tie their children on their backs, when they have to walk
a great way. They licked the oil on the outside of our lamps, just as a
dog or a cat would have done. Oh, what dirty people! They eat their
meat raw. We killed a seal one day, and our captain gave it to one of
the young women. She took it, and bit it into pieces with her teeth.
Then she passed it round to the rest of the Indians, and they all helped
eat it.

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THE WHITE BEARS.
There are a great many white bears in that country. Sometimes you can
see two or three of them sitting on one of these ice-hills. How they ever
got there, I am sure I cannot tell. I guess they went out on the ice only a
little way from the shore, to get something which they saw was good to
eat; and while they were on the ice, it started off, and they could not get
to the shore again.
One of the men who sailed in the same ship with me, told me a story
about a white bear, which made me laugh for an hour after I heard it.
He said he was in a small boat with another sailor once, about a mile
away from the ship. I forget what they went out in the boat for, but I
suppose the captain of the ship sent them out for something. They were
rowing along in the boat, and they came close to an iceberg. They saw
something alive on the iceberg, but they could not make out what it was:
they did not know but it was a man. But they came a little nearer to the
great ice-hill, and they soon found out what sort of a thing there was on
it. Splash something went into the water; and in a minute a great white
bear jumped into the boat, as wet as a drowned rat.
Well, the sailors thought they had got to die, sure enough. What could
they do? The first thing that they thought of, was to try to kill the bear
with their oars. But they soon gave that up. They saw that the bear was
too large and strong to be killed in that way. The next thing they
thought of doing, was to jump into the water. But they knew they
would die if they did that. What should they do? "I wonder which of us
the old fellow will take